[1] In 1923 he presented the Cinégraphe Bol at the Geneva fair, a reversible apparatus for taking, printing, and projecting pictures on 35 mm film.

Over the years, notable Bolex users and owners include: Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Andy Warhol, Peter Jackson, Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Godard, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Dean, David Lynch, Marilyn Monroe, Edmund Hillary, and Mahatma Gandhi[2] While some later models are electrically powered, the majority of those manufactured since the 1930s use a spring-wound clockwork power system.

Bolex was bought by Paillard & Cie [de] for 350,000 Swiss francs and Jacques Bogopolsky was hired as consulting engineer for five years.

Soon Paillard realized that the cameras and projectors were not in fact the exceptional products promised by their partners, and after two years Jacque Bogopolsky was no longer welcome in Sainte-Croix.

The traditional version of the story tended to present the situation rather simply: Bolex is the name of a brand produced by the Paillard company, a brand represented mainly by a camera that was invented by Jacques Boolsky (another of Jacques Bogopolsky's names).

[3] In 1932, Marc Renaud, a young engineer, inspired by the products of Paillard and assisted by Professor Ernest Juillard,[who?]

The company also made a successful range of high-end movie projectors for all amateur film making gauges.

Several technical changes were made to the H cameras in 1954, above all an entirely different claw drive together with a laterally inverted film gate and a 170 degrees opening angle shutter.

In reaction to the upcoming use of heavier varifocal or zoom lenses and the bigger synchronous electric motors attached to the body Paillard gave it a big rectangular base, with three tapped bushings replacing the original single-tap “button” base in 1963 and soon afterward a protruding 1-to-1 shaft for the ESM motor.

Unlike the classic mechanical Bolex Cameras, the 280 Macrozoom needed 5 1.5 volt batteries to operate.

[4] Many directors began their careers shooting on Paillard-Bolex Cameras, including Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Jonas Mekas, Peter Jackson,[8][9] Terry Gilliam, Will Vinton, Maya Deren, Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee.

It results as a development of a cult of using Paillard-Bolex for decades for beginner's camera in film schools worldwide.

[10] Jules Schulback, a furrier and maker of home movies, filmed, with his 16-millimeter Bolex camera, Marilyn Monroe's white skirt billowing from a "gust" up through a subway grate, in a publicity stunt for The Seven Year Itch, around the corner from his apartment, in New York.

[11][12] The Bolex cameras remain a strong status as an icon into cinema and intemporal beautiful objects as itself.

[14] Another time in 2015 various Bolex models, including P2/8 mm and Super Zoom/8 mm, appeared in a famous campaign for Chanel eyewear with Kristen Stewart[15][16] "The Bolex H 16 camera played a central role in the work of many avant-garde filmmakers from the 1940s through to the 1970s because of its precision and lightweight, robustness and range of facilities, and the high quality of its optics, especially the zoom lenses, and its simple operation, which made possible an infinite combination of creative cinematographic choices.

From the beginning, it offered automatic film threading, a clutch for disengaging the drive spring in order to crank the film by hand forward and backwards unlimited, and a cut-off turret disc that is not wider than the camera body in center position.